Kamehameha Schools Archives

Princeton Alumni Weekly Current Issue Dec. 14, 2011 Vol. 112, No. 5

The education of Earl Kim *93
A schools chief learns about reform and politics the hard way
By Merrell Noden ’78
Published in the December 14, 2011, issue

Earl Kim *93, center, with teacher Bonnie Lieu ’06, left, and board member Adelle Kirk ’93.

Though he has never been afraid of a battle — he wrestled at Cornell and was a Marine platoon commander in the South Pacific (he also competed on the Marines’ military pentathlon team) — Kim is nothing if not disarmingly polite. Those who work with him say he never loses his temper. Walsh believes Kim’s actions stem from his sense that, but for certain breaks, he might have fallen through the cracks himself.

Growing up in Honolulu, Kim saw his parents split up when he was in ninth grade. He and his brother went with his father, while his sister went with his mother. As a student at the private Iolani School, Kim became a troublemaker.

Kim likes to tell a story to illustrate why he cares so deeply about education. One day he got kicked out of class. He was outside in the courtyard performing the customary punishment of pulling weeds when he was spotted by a teacher who knew him only slightly. Puzzled to find him performing this task, he asked Kim, “What are you doing out here? You should be thinking about which colleges you want to apply to.”

Coming, as it did, out of the blue, that vote of confidence touched Kim, and while it did not reform him instantly, it is part of an important pattern in his life: “I have been affected by chance encounters with wonderful teachers who literally changed the trajectory of my life,” he says.

There was one other big influence on Kim from his childhood, though he would not feel it as such for decades. That was his paternal grandfather, Henry Cu Kim, who worked as a security guard in a pineapple-canning plant. He was unable to communicate with his grandson because cancer had taken his vocal cords. After Henry Kim died in 1967, Kim’s lasting memory of his grandfather was of a silent old man who sat watching him play.

So both he and his father were stunned to receive, in 1995, a letter from the Korean government. It asked permission to exhume Henry Cu Kim’s remains to be buried in a cemetery reserved for generals and patriots in Korea. Apparently the silent old man had been something of a secret agent fighting the Japanese occupation of his country. Only when Kim belatedly read his grandfather’s autobiography did he learn how his grandfather had trekked across Mongolia, Russia, and Europe before sailing to New York City. Juggling as many as 10 aliases, he ended up in, of all places, Hastings, Neb. There, he worked with a team of Korean expatriates dedicated to winning Korean independence.

“It’s a neat story,” says Kim. “It is one of the drivers in my life, feeling the obligation to live up to what my parents and grandparents sacrificed. My brother chose medicine. I just happened to choose education.”

In telling his own life’s story, Kim often emphasizes the good fortune he’s had, rather than the hard work he’s done. Knowing he could attend college only if someone else paid for it, Kim explored the ROTC program, applying to colleges he found on the back of an ROTC pamphlet. He chose Cornell, where he majored in history and joined the Marines’ ROTC program, selecting it over the Navy’s program.

“Someone told me that in the Navy, I’d sleep in clean sheets,” Kim recalls. “Clean sheets didn’t matter to me. What mattered was the Marines’ promise that I would be taught leadership skills.”

After Cornell and four years of active duty in the Marines, Kim decided he wanted to be a teacher; furthermore, he wanted to teach in the inner city. He made cold calls to both Trenton and Camden high schools and told them he was interested in teaching there. Camden turned him down, but he was invited to visit Trenton Central High School. An assistant principal gave him a tour of the school, at the end of which he was told to go down to the office to fill out the necessary forms for a job. He taught math, helped coach the wrestling team, and oversaw a variety of student activities, all while attending evening and Saturday classes to earn a teaching certificate. “I was very mission-oriented,” he says. “You told me what the students needed to know, and I’d pound it into them, the Parris Island way.”

His three years in Trenton gave Kim more firsthand experience with the problems of poor districts than most superintendents ever get. He insists that the teachers he worked with in Trenton were as dedicated as those in Montgomery, despite the additional challenges. One huge obstacle to their success, he says, is turnover — not just of students, but of teachers (44 percent in Trenton last year, largely because of budget cuts) — and administrators, who had their hands full. “You never saw an administrator because they were always dealing with disciplinary issues,” he says. “We had a police substation in Trenton High!”

Teaching high school, Kim came to believe that solving the most difficult problems facing public schools required educators and policy makers to communicate, but the educators weren’t being heard because “they didn’t speak the same language the policy makers did.” He wanted teachers to have a voice. And so he enrolled at the Woodrow Wilson School, where he tailored his own program of study that included macroeconomics with now-Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, labor economics, and higher-education policy. Kim still reads studies in economics journals — studies that most people in education never see.

The lessons that Kim learned in the Marines, in Trenton, and a few miles up Route 1 in Princeton stuck with him. Arriving in Montgomery as superintendent in 2008 after a stint as the schools chief in Verona, N.J., he brought a belief and trust in public-school teachers, who find themselves belittled in many school-reform quarters these days. “The philosophy in the Marine Corps was to give responsibility to the lowest level possible, to the people closest to the ground,” Kim explains. “In the same way, the organizational structure of Montgomery schools is designed around teams of teachers working together, making professional judgments based on what is in front of them — the children. You have to have trust that they’re going to make the right judgments.”

He challenges the notion that New Jersey school districts amount to a failure. It’s not that there isn’t dysfunction in the Abbott districts, and elsewhere, he says — there is. But he points to the most recent Quality Counts report, the annual report card published by Education Week, which shows that New Jersey has been making progress, and closing the achievement gap between white and African-American students. “To say that reform or school improvement isn’t occurring in New Jersey is a narrative that somebody’s created,” says Kim.

Kim is eager to challenge other beliefs that have become accepted as fact by many in today’s public-education wars. Take, for example, the claim that nothing is more important in a student’s academic success than the quality of his teachers. That claim is the primary justification for a New Jersey executive order calling for a statewide evaluation system for teachers and principals, and is at the center of debates over merit pay across the country. But Kim — leader of a statewide group of education reformers hoping to have input into the new system — says that’s true only if you exclude all external factors. Individual teachers, he insists, make a difference of only three or four percentage points in student performance. In some cases teachers and schools together can explain about 50 percent of a student’s performance, he says, but other factors, such as “family and income and the dog barking outside the schoolhouse when they are taking the test,” will have a huge impact too.

He also challenges plans to weed out bad teachers by basing as much as half of a teacher’s evaluation on student test scores — the kind of plan promoted by some of the nation’s best-known education reformers, such as Michelle Rhee, former head of the Washington, D.C., public schools. Unfortu­­nately, says Kim, “our test-making has not caught up with our thinking about what makes for a good assessment.” First, he argues, existing standardized tests don’t measure the ­higher-order reasoning and critical-thinking skills that are so important. He believes that a large number of teachers — about one-quarter — are assessed incorrectly by commonly used tests. “It’s literally, to my mind, malpractice to base anything important on them. I don’t know how these people are going to do it in good conscience.” He contends that today’s mania for testing has produced a host of unintended consequences, including the cheating scandals that have come to light in a number of cities, because educators fear their jobs are on the line each time their students sit for a test.

A far better predictor of success in life, Kim says, are non-cognitive skills, those hard-to-describe qualities we all got from that small handful of teachers who excited us about a subject and whom we still recall fondly decades later. “Based on our analysis, it turns out they are more predictive” than standard tests, says Kim, alluding to a study conducted in Montgomery of the college “persistence” — the ability to stick with college through completion — of Montgomery graduates. (Catherine Che ’11 did the number-crunching as part of the analysis for her senior thesis in economics.)

Kim isn’t suggesting we scrap standardized tests altogether, only that we work hard to improve them while recognizing that they are just “our first pass at measuring teacher effectiveness.” Instead, if the tests suggest that there’s a problem “because some group of kids is underperforming versus others in their grade level or course, then we look deeper — at practices in the classroom, at preparation and planning.” Indeed, Montgomery is combining teacher evaluation with teacher development, and has created a program in which teachers themselves will monitor each other’s practice, provide help to those who need it, and, when necessary, decide who needs to go. “When teachers really believe they are the guardians of professional teaching practice, they will enforce this,” he says. “They don’t want bad teachers in this district.”

Not everyone buys all that Kim puts forward, of course. Laura Waters, who writes a blog on issues on New Jersey education called, tellingly, NJ Left Behind, admires Kim and his willingness to take a stand on important issues. Still, she thinks “it’s a cop-out” to take the focus off what schools can do. In that, Kim would not disagree.

Kim worries about the declining attractiveness of teaching as a profession. Already, he says, four “very good teachers” left his district’s classrooms this year to work at private schools, which, Kim says, “pay better and don’t have to deal with the noise you’re hearing coming from our state and federal governments.”

They may not be the last. The exodus is expected to include superintendents, especially since the state has capped pay at $175,000 (Kim, whose contract expires in 2013, says that bonuses and other allowances in the law would have “kept me whole”), and more than 300 New Jersey school superintendents face substantial pay cuts.

Frustrated by the school battles, and above all by what he perceives as the Christie administration’s unwillingness to discuss the issues fairly, Kim, too, has been wooed away, back to Hawaii. After worrying all through the year that his outspokenness would hurt Montgomery in Trenton, he accepted an offer last month to become the headmaster of the Kamehameha School’s flagship campus in Honolulu. “I do believe,” he says, “that I am not meeting the needs of the current administration. Better to go where I’m ­needed, eh?”

Merrell Noden ’78 is a frequent PAW contributor.

BACKGROUND
Lydia Aholo was Queen Liliʻuokalaniʻs keki hanai. Born in 1878, she was 101 years old when she died in 1979 at Maunalani Hospital in Kaimuki. She attended Kawaiahaʻo Seminary at a very early age supported by the Queen. The Seminary was located near the Palace grounds. In 1894 when Kamehameha School for Girls opened and Miss Ida May Pope, a Seminary teacher, was appointed Principal, a group of Seminary girls including Lydia followed her. Lydia graduated in the first class of Kamehameha School for Girls in 1897. She matriculated at Oberlin College at their music conservatory in Ohio where she became a close friend of the Pope family. She returned to Kamehameha Schools where she became a registrar and under President Frank E. Midkiff (1923-33), the first Hawaiian language instructor in both schools. She never married. Her ʻohana includes Alfred Aholo Apaka, a grandnephew and Frances Apaka Mahelona, KSG Class of 1938, a grandniece.

Lydiaʻs father, Luther, was Minister of the Interior under King Kalākaua. Her mother, Keahi, died when she was six days old and the King recommended that his sister hanai his child since she was childless herself.

PRESENT
In August 2011, an audio tape of an interview of Lydia by author Helena G. Allen was given to Kamehameha Schools Archives by the executor of the authorʻs estate, Phillip Livoni. On December 18, 2011, StarAdvertiser features reporter Mike Gordon wrote an article “Lydiaʻs Voice” about the quest for this tape by researcher, Professor Sandee Bonura, and the story of the return of the audio tape to Hawaiʻi.

What about Lydia fascinates us today?